He just became the oldest man to go to space, and he has surprising SC connections

Ed Dwight left Earth Sunday morning for outer space.

The 90-year-old sculptor and former Air Force captain joined five other passengers on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin spaceflight, which took off from west Texas around 10:30 a.m. Sunday, according to various news reports.

The trip made Dwight the oldest person to ever reach space, a record previously held by William Shatner, who also made a trek beyond the atmosphere in a Blue Origin shuttle in 2022.

But Dwight’s story begins much earlier that Sunday morning. The former NASA test pilot and famed sculptor has also crafted some of the country’s largest monuments to African American history, including one on the grounds of the South Carolina State House.

Dwight was commissioned more than two decades ago by the state Legislature to build a $1.2 million unflinching monument to South Carolina’s African American history. The large semi-circle monument on the State House grounds depicts a slave ship and other scenes addressing the long practice of slavery in the state. It also shows scenes depicting emancipation and the Civil Rights Movement. It was erected in 2001 and at the time was the largest monument on the State House grounds.

Dwight’s original design also included depictions of hooded Klansmen and Black men being lynched, but the design was revised to include those elements in writing only, according to Historic Columbia.

Dwight also created a 7-foot-tall sculpture of Cheraw, South Carolina-native son Dizzy Gillespie, who is credited with being a founding father of modern jazz. That sculpture is on display in downtown Cheraw, a town of about 5,000 residents two hours northeast of Columbia.

Dwight was born in 1933 in Kansas City, Kansas. His father played for the Kansas City Monarchs, which were part of Major League Baseball’s all-Black baseball league.

On his website, Dwight describes himself as an artist since his youth, but his first professional venture was as a test pilot for the U.S. Air Force.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy’s administration chose Dwight as the first Black astronaut trainee in NASA’s history. But because of racism, Dwight resigned from NASA in 1966 before he made it into space.

That is when he turned his attention to his artistic prospects. While studying in the Masters of Fine Arts program at the University of Denver, he was commissioned to sculpt a series of statues commemorating Black Americans in the frontier west, according to his biography.

In the years since, he’s crafted monuments to Black history across the U.S. He was even hired to create a life-size scene depicting President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration.

Dwight’s recent trip to space was paid for by Blue Origin and two charitable foundations, according to NPR.

“All these years, I’ve been called an astronaut,” Dwight told NPR after returning to Earth Sunday. But “now I have a little [astronaut] pin, which is ... a totally different matter.”